Why should it be a contention between them?  For this reason:  he was reduced to admire her act; and if he admired, he could not admire without respecting; if he respected, perforce he reverenced; if he reverenced, he worshipped.  Therefore she had him at her feet.  At the feet of any woman, except for the trifling object!  But at the feet of ‘It is my husband!’ That would be a reversal of things.

Are not things reversed when the name Carinthia sounds in the thought of him who laughed at the name not less angelically martial than Feltre’s adored silver trumpets of his Papal procession; sweeter of the new morning for the husband of the woman; if he will but consent to the worshipper’s posture?  Yes, and when Gower Woodseer’s ’Malady of the Wealthy,’ as he terms the pivotting of the whole marching and wheeling world upon the favoured of Fortune’s habits and tastes, promises to quit its fell clutch on him?

Another voice in the young nobleman cried:  Pooh, dolt and dupe! and surrounded her for half a league with reek of burnt flesh and shrieks of a tortured child; giving her the aspect of a sister of the Parcw.  But it was not the ascendant’ voice.  It growled underneath, much like the deadly beast at Carinthia’s gown while she stood:—­an image of her to dominate the princeliest of men.

The princeliest must have won his title to the place before he can yield other than complimentary station to a woman without violation of his dignity; and vast wealth is not the title; worldly honours are not; deeds only are the title.  Fleetwood consented to tell himself that he had not yet performed the deeds.

Therefore, for him to be dominated was to be obscured, eclipsed.  A man may outrun us; it is the fortune of war.  Eclipsed behind the skirts of a woman waving her upraised hands, with, ’Back, pray!’—­no, that ignominy is too horribly abominable!  Be sure, the situation will certainly recur in some form; will constantly recur.  She will usurp the lead; she will play the man.

Let matters go on as they are.  We know our personal worth.

Arrived at this point in the perpetual round of the conflict Carinthia had implanted, Fleetwood entered anew the ranks of the ordinary men of wealth and a coronet, and he hugged himself.  He enjoyed repose; knowing it might be but a truce.  Matters might go on as they were.  Still, he wished her away from those Wythans, residing at Esslemont.  There she might come eventually to a better knowledge of his personal worth:—­’the gold mine we carry in our bosoms till it is threshed out of us in sweat,’ that fellow Gower Woodseex says; adding, that we are the richer for not exploring it.  Philosophical cynicism is inconclusive.  Fleetwood knew his large capacities; he had proved them and could again.  In case a certain half foreseen calamity should happen:—­imagine it a fact, imagine him seized, besides admiring her character, with a taste for her person!  Why, then, he would have to impress his own mysteriously deep character on her portion of understanding.  The battle for domination would then begin.